Way Out West

Hollywood grinds out more westerns than any other single kind of movie (last year's total: 101). When operating on a high budget, producers try to vary the formula. Three such attempts turned up last week:

Vengeance Valley (MGM) tries, with some success, to picture the West as a real environment in which cowboys put in a solid day's work. Based on a Satevepost serial by Luke Short, the picture looks more closely into human relationships than most westerns. Another point in its favor: perennially boyish Robert Walker appears for a change as the leading heavy.

The ne'er-do-well son of a cattleman, Walker cheats on his wife (Joanne Dru) and relies on his foster brother, Ranch Foreman Burt Lancaster, to rescue him from such scrapes as getting a neighboring girl into trouble. Thinking Lancaster the culprit, the girl's vengeful brothers go gunning for him. Walker helps them on the sly so he can eliminate Lancaster as an obstacle to his schemes for embezzling the old man's cattle.

The movie gives the customers plenty of violence; Hero Lancaster's brawls net him a badly mauled head, a knife gash in the side, a bullet in the arm. But much of the story is fitted neatly into a weeks-long cattle roundup over vast stretches of Technicolored country. In the spirit of 1948's excellent Red River, if not with the same scope and skill, Vengeance Valley works diligently to show what a big job a roundup is, and just how the cowpunchers go at it.

Frenchie (Universal-International) tries hard to spice up horse opera with sex appeal. Its wide open spaces consist mostly of the territory just north of Shelley Winters' neckline, and about the only rustling in the picture is the sound of hip-tossed taffeta.

Shelley plays Frenchie Fontaine, a New Orleans gambling queen who packs a dainty pistol just above the garter. She sets up shop in the frontier town of Bottleneck to track down the local varmints who killed her father. In the course of a plot with as many turns as her corset strings, Shelley has all the fun of acting like a trollop, then finally turns out to be a perfect lady, worthy of Sheriff Joel McCrea himself.

As treated in Marlene Dietrich's 1939 Destry Rides Again and Mae Westerns of the '30s, the come-hither approach proved a welcome change from they-went-thataway. Frenchie does not make the grade. The script's attempts to laugh at sex come down to smirks and leers, and Actress Winters plays a poor man's Mae West with little more authority than a schoolgirl flouncing through the attic in mother's old clothes.

The Great Missouri Raid (Paramount) is a pseudohistorical western that whitewashes the Jesse James gang in bright Technicolor. An earlier version of the desperado's career, 1939's moneymaking Jesse James, depicted the James boys as victims of a land-grabbing railroad which forced them into a life of crime. In the new vogue for brewing westerns out of the backwash of the Civil War, they become Southern martyrs hounded by a vindictive Yankee major.

About half the picture is devoted to needling its heroes into taking the law into their own hands. The movie keeps the action going at full tilt and draws on such acting talent as Macdonald Carey (Jesse), Wendell Corey (Frank James) and Ward Bond (the Yankee villain). Moviegoers who find glorified hoodlums hard to stomach, even at a safe historical distance, may suspect that Hollywood is almost ready for a film biography treating Al Capone--played, say, by Alan Ladd--as the innocent butt of a spiteful internal-revenue man.

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